The Death of Socrates

Monday, 31 October 2011

The attitude of Christ and His Apostles to Marriage and Family

Jesus was not at all keen on the family. He warns that family loyalty
competes with loyalty to the Kingdom;[1] that His followers must expect
to experience hostility from even their closest relatives;[2] and that
they may well have to abandon their kin altogether.[3]

Jesus asserts that the true household is not based on ties of
blood or romantic attachment; but on a shared acceptance of Gospel
values.[4] If such an acceptance is characteristic of a particular
family, well and good; but there is nothing about the domestic unit, as
such, which makes it apt to substantiate Christian values. The Kingdom
is meant to grow by the preaching of the Gospel and by adults being
converted towards justice;[5] not by the procreation and indoctrination
of children.[6] In any case, Jesus insists that marriage and the family
are things of mortality, and that after the resurrection they will cease
to exist.[7]

Christ not only took a stand against the whole tradition of
the old covenant, according to which marriage and procreation were
religiously privileged, as we have said. But in a certain sense He
expressed Himself even in opposition to that beginning to which He
Himself had appealed. [John Paul II “Allocution” (March 31st 1982)]

The Apostle Paul has a somewhat more positive view of marriage and
the family. He expects family members to provide for impoverished
relatives, rather then relying on the largess of the Church.[8] He tells
children to obey their parents and fathers to be moderate in
disciplining their progeny,[9] and in the same passage exhorts slaves to
obey their masters. While Paul is convinced that it is much better for
men not to have any physical relations with women, and presents his own
celibate lifestyle as an example to all;[10] he nevertheless tolerates
marriage as a second best arrangement for those incapable of sexual
continence.[11] In a more generous spirited moment, Paul writes of
Christian marriage as an icon of the relationship of Christ with the
Church.[12]

The Epistle to the Hebrews insists that marriage is honourable
and its bed is clean,[13] while emphasising that Christians must not
adopt an insular domestic outlook: and enjoining the duties of
maintaining fellowship with the wider Church community and of showing
hospitality to strangers. Neither Jesus nor any of his Apostles ever
suggests that either marriage or the family is particularly significant
in the divine scheme of things. They never say that it is the building
block of secular society, still less of the Church. They never refer to
the family as “the domestic church”. Indeed, this is an altogether
modern invention.[14] Although Augustine[15] twice makes use of the idea
and Chrysostum[16] once, they suggest more that the secular institution
of the family can, with some effort, be Christened, than that it is
constitutive of the Church.

1. Mat 8:21-22. Lk 9:59-62; 14:16-26.

2. Mat 10:17-22, 34-37. Mk 13:11-13. Lk 12:51-53.

3. Mat 19:27-29. Mk 10:28-30. Lk 18:28-30.

4. Mat 12:46-50. Mk 3:21-35. Lk 8:19-21.

5. Mat 4:17, 10:7. Mk 1:38; 3:14; 16:15. Lk 4:18, 43; 9:2.

6. Jn 1:12-13.

7. Mat 22:29-30 Mk 12:24- 25 Lk 20:34-36. Pope John Paul II deduces
from this fact the conclusion that the theological significance of
gender cannot be determined in terms of marriage and reproduction.

8. 1Tim 5:4-8, 16.

9. Eph 6:1-9 Col 3:20-4:1.

10. 1Cor 7:1-9, quoted on page 26.

11. 1Cor 7:10-39.

12. Eph 5:21-33. Many modern scholars dispute that Paul wrote
Ephesians. The converse image (where the union of Christ and the Church
is presented as a marriage) is found in the Apocalypse. [Apoc 19:7-9]